Last night, yet another recommendation issued forth from the hallowed governmental halls: FEMA should be abolished and rebuilt. (CNN)

Crippled by years of poor leadership and inadequate funding, the Federal Emergency Management Agency cannot be fixed, a bipartisan investigation says in recommendations to be released Thursday.

Taken together, the 86 proposed reforms suggest the United States is still woefully unprepared for a disaster such as Katrina with the start of the hurricane season a little more than month away.

No one who lives along the Gulf Coast will be surprised at the news that FEMA is hopelessly broken, and certainly there is a need for large scale disaster planning. Americans everywhere, not just along the coasts, should be appalled by their own personal exposure: (NOLA.com):

“Hurricane Katrina: A Nation Still Unprepared” offers a sobering assessment of the government’s ability to prepare for future disasters on the order of Katrina, which left more than 1,200 dead, destroyed thousands of homes and caused billions of dollars in damage.

“As documented in this report, FEMA does not have the capacity to respond to large-scale disasters and catastrophes,” the study says. “The United States was, and is, ill-prepared to respond to a catastrophic event of the magnitude of Hurricane Katrina.”

Of course FEMA doesn’t have that capacity. It’s part of a monstrous governmental entity, and even if they rebuild it, it will still be ponderously slow. Dangerously slow.

Bureaucracies do not have the ability to make fast decisions, or respond at

a micro-level. As interesting as it is to read about the government’s post-disaster

analysis, there is a different, related lesson that needs to be learned, though

not by our government: in the event of a major disaster, the first and best

responses come at the individual and local level.

People cannot, and should not, make plans that rely upon timely outside assistance

from any major organization in the throes of an emergency. It doesn’t matter

whether it’s the American Red Cross, FEMA, DHS, or yet another acronym du

jour — when the rubber hits the road, it’s up to individuals, communities, towns, and cities to take care of ourselves

until help can be organized and mobilized.

How big will the next catastrophe be? Where will it hit? There is no way to predict such a thing, and to Polimom, the government fouled itself trying to meet the immediate needs on far too massive a scale.

Americans seem to have lost the rugged spirit with which this country was founded,

and the expectation that the government would ride to the rescue on a massive

white horse was as big a killer as the failed levees, storm surges, and howling

winds.

So fine – you guys drive on and build that bigger, better FEMA mousetrap. In

the meantime, another hurricane season is coming. Hopefully DHS, FEMA, and

the Senate committee members aren’t the only ones that learned some lessons.

17 Responses

Duh !!! Why has it taken seven months of wasting taxpayer money to figure this out. The entire nation knew all this in the first few days of Katrina aftermath. I suspect we have a lot of members of congress just making work to continue looking busy and as if they are REALLY trying to do something for the American public. If in fact they were, they would cut to the chase and get it done instead of spending so much time and money going from one committee to another just to eventually end up with the same, though renamed megalith monster.

June 1 is coming — the start of yet another hurricane season, and Polimom feels stuck in one of those spiral “thingies” they have at the malls, where you set a coin on its side and watch it travel down into a funnel – faster and faste…

“As interesting as it is to read about the government’s post-disaster analysis, there is a different, related lesson that needs to be learned, though not by our government: in the event of a major disaster, the first and best responses come at the individual and local level.”

Looks like we found some common ground Polimom. The FEMA shake-up is nothng more than a PR campaign designed to help the current 22% approval rating of Congress in an election year. The predictable Bush bashing the media orchestrated after Katrina can only divert the attention from the dismal performance of the local officials in New Orleans for so long.

There is a great article written by Nicole Gelinas in the City Journal.

It mirrors what you are saying in that one of the reasons the Houston government succeeded where the NOLA government failed was its strategy to act first, get reimbursed by the federal government later.

Once upon a time, before FEMA was assimilated by the huge DHS monster, it used to have its own budget, along with the authority to spend money to be proactive, i. e. to help fund programs in “at risk” communities to prepare for or mitigate disasters. An example might be to approach New Orleans and say:

“We are prepared to pay the drivers’ salaries and fuel needed to use your school bus fleet to evacuate people the two days before the storm hits. We will also pay the costs to move your school bus fleet 50 miles inland the day before the storm hits, so that it and the drivers will be available to help with the aftermath.” It’s much easier to get local officials to do something like that if they don’t have to scrounge up the money themselves.

According to Michael Brown (as in “You’re doing a great job, Brownie!”) when DHS absorbed FEMA that authority was taken away, and the discretionary funds transferred elsewhere within DHS “to meet more urgent needs”. The Director of FEMA also lost his direct access to the President, becoming a subordinate of the Director of DHS.

Rather than renaming FEMA and pretending to have actually done something real, how about restoring FEMA’s independence and budget authority? How about asking FEMA to spend money working with state and local officials on prevention and mitigation strategies, and bringing money to the table to help pay for them? No doubt there will be some waste, fraud, and sweetheart deals. Much will no doubt also be spent preparing locations for disasters that don’t strike, or that strike miles away, but it would be cheap compared to another, “hang in there, we’ll get help to you within a week . . . probably!” response.

Under Clinton, FEMA responded well to hurricanes, in Florida and elsewhere. Even under the ineffective “leadership” of Michael Brown, there were enough senior employees left to be proactive in Florida, getting staff in place ahead of the four hurricanes that hit Florida in one season. But many people have left, discouraged by the appointment of people with no skills except fund-raising for Republicans.

To ruin an agency and then complain that it’s ruined it a bit hypocritical. To say to poorer parts of the country, “You should rely on local leadership” is just an abandonment of basic social and moral responsibility.

The Bush administration has gone a long way towards ruining the National Guard, too. Should the Guard be abolished?

Reading your article I am reminded that the “deer in the headlight” look we saw on faces in New Orleans and the frustration of those who were expecting a “white horse” is predictable but unacceptable. It is no more safe to expose your family to harm through ignorance than it is to willingly do so. Families across the country must start to engage their communities in the process of self-preservation. Since I began working for the Red Cross I take a lot less for granted, like electricity and evacuation routes. If we do nothing more than assess our vulnerabilities we have made a step in the right direction. Now is the time to get involved and empowered. During an evacuation it is too late to find that you can’t keep your dog cool or your great-aunt hydrated. While we may expect miracles we should not count on them. Managing expectations is a responsibility we all carry.

Under Clinton, FEMA responded well to hurricanes, in Florida and elsewhere.

Posted by: Wendy at April 27, 2006 03:57 PM

Under Bush, FEMA responded well to several storms in Florida and a little thing that happened on 9/11/01 also Wendy. Maybe the locals in Florida, New York, and Pennsylvania did their jobs so FEMA could do theirs and New Orleans didn’t?

“The United States was, and is, ill-prepared to respond to a catastrophic event of the magnitude of Hurricane Katrina.”

I especially liked this quote out of the report. What do they mean “ill-prepared?” Relative to who, exactly? Because I’m pretty damn sure that we handled that situation as good as any other country could have handled a similar disaster.

Or perhaps they just mean “ill-prepared” in the objective sense–i.e., that our level of preparation could not match the destructive power of a Category 5 hurricane passing over a city that sits below sea level. But, hell–that’s why they call them “disasters,” because they’ve plagued mankind since the days of Noah, and because no civilization has ever been prepared to deal with their destructive power.

Count me as part of the contingency that feels nothing in the way of outrage toward the FEMA response to Katrina. A massive hurricane hit the poorest, most vulnerable, and worst managed city in the country. Everybody with half a brain and a nickel in their pocket managed to get out of town. The poor and the stupid are always going to suffer in a disaster, and it hardly makes sense to keep a bureaucratic behemoth sitting by waiting to bail them out next time a hundred-year storm rolls around.

Maybe the FEMA budget arrangement could be improved a bit. But given the impossible task of quickly evacuating an entire city in the face of a hurricane, there would have still been plenty of people left behind. And even if we had some sort of Wonder Agency capable of such a task, you’d still have the jackasses who refuse to leave…….and then gripe about the lack of assistance when they’re plucked off their roof a week later.

Katrina did not strike just New Orleans… nor was that the only storm last year to wreak havoc. Yet days after the storms, there were communities – not just New Orleans – who had not had any ice, nor water, etc. Even weeks after the second storm, there were towns that FEMA somehow still didn’t know about, right here in Texas.

I was very frustrated with FEMA – and other agencies, too. But they were utterly overwhelmed by both the magnitude of the disaster and their own bureaucracy and regulations.

Well Polimom, you always seem to take and/or support the victim mentality. What do you want, entire cities waiting completely stocked with food and transportation ready 365 days a year for potential natural disasters to happen?

Are you really an unhappy person. You seem to argue with everyone and everything. Is there anything you like, are you just taking the other side of everything. I can’t imagine anyone being around you for a long period of time. When I saw the images of the devistation of Katrina and Rita it was so sad and heartbreaking. I am glad they are taking a hard look at FEMA, they did not do a very good job. Maybe at 9/11 they were effective but they certainly were not at the hurricanes.

Risa, you are missing the point. Yes FEMA can be improved on but the root cause of the pain and suffering to the people in New Orleans was the local officials not doing their jobs and implementing their own evacuation plans. The focus away from the root cause will no doubt allow the travesty to repeat itself.

This past weekend FEMA and the City of Austin , along with the Texas Workforce Commission setup a job training/hiring/interview/job fair for all the Katrina FEMA evacuees in the Austin area to be held at the ACC campus on Webberville Road in East Austin.

Several of the evacuees said they had no transportation to get from the apartment complexes. So the city of Austin/FEMA/TWC set up transportation for each of them to

ensure they would be able to partake of the benefit of job searching.

The transportation consisted of nine buses and vans, to run from four locations in Round Rock, and five locations in Austin, in continuing shuttles back and forth to the campus to ensure that the hundreds of people looking for jobs would be transported in comfort. The vehicles were brought to their residences; drivers knocked on the doors; and every effort was made.

At the end of the day, the nine vans and buses transported a total of one person. Not one person per bus – one person total. At the end of the day, none of the Katrina Evacuees applied for any of the jobs. Not one person took employment – NONE total.